entury mystics, its resurrection in the noble school of German
idealism which grew out of the teaching of the great master himself,
Immanuel Kant. The man who introduced it to England, the link, so to
speak, between Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Emerson, was Coleridge, for
whom there is but one reason, shared in by all intelligent beings,
which is in itself the universal soul. To this profoundly reverent
thinker reason is not a faculty, much less a property of the human
mind. Man cannot be said so much to possess reason as to partake of
it. He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own
possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in
the canopy of heaven.

Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is
the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world. It is one and identical in all men, even as the sun in the
high heavens is one and the same for every dweller in the solar system.
Yea, more than this, we cannot shrink from the consequences of our
affirmation, the mind in man is not conceivably other than the Mind
which is self-subsistent and infinite. After what manner shall we
conceive of the intelligence which laid down the foundations of the
world, traced the pathway of the stars, fixed the laws which nature has
immutably obeyed from the eternal past even to this hour, if we
conceive it not after the manner of the mind in us which has at length
discovered these laws? How can we hold one intelligence to know and
another to originate them? As truth is one and identical for all
minds, so must be the intelligences which know and originate that
truth. Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these
agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes--a bald contradiction in
terms. It affects to be unable to discern Mind in the cosmos when it
is exercising that very mind in formulating its doubts. It is as
though a man should go hunting his house for a light with a candle
burning in his hand. What on earth can we be searching for when the
"candle of the Lord," as Locke called it, is the very illuminant we
must employ in our search? "Tell me," Emerson would ask, "the truths
your sciences establish, the principle of your philosophies, are they
valid for all intelligences or only some?" Surely, for all
intelligences, you will reply. "Then, I will urge, these truths must
be one and identical if all intelligences admit them."